Anisha Das End Term Assignment. Promt 6.

Promt 6- Non-Fiction: Using 2000 to 2500 words, write evocatively about your family history. Consult a variety of sources to write this account.   

Ranna Ghor (The Kitchen)

“You should learn how to cook. When you leave this house what will people say what we have taught you.” I have heard Dida say this since school. It’s been three years since I left home and I am tired of ordering in or complaining about the food that is put on my plate. I hated the food in hostel but I did not complain. I understand that they cook for an army. And they had enough angry and hungry students to deal with already. I devised another plan; I made friends with the kitchen staff, I used to get a lot of favors and I used to wait till the last hour of meal time, till I am so hungry that whatever is served on my plate just looks like food. I don’t know if that worked, but I was not eating for taste, I was eating to survive. I was eating because if you fall sick in a university hostel they take you to the cheapest government hospital. I went there for a friend once; and I swore to myself that I would never go back there ever again. I was very committed to myself and my words. In Universities there is always this one kid who believes ending their life is somehow better then living it. I faced a case like that, and I was the only senior in the room. She cut her hand and I was so hell bent on not going back to that hospital that I took the piece of glass out of her wrist, dipped a ball of cotton in nail polish remover and pressed it against the cut. I held it tight till she stopped screaming. She stopped crying, and when she woke up she patched up with the guy she did this for and later came to apologize to me. It should have been the other way around, but I had an exam the next day so I did not explain why I did what I did. I am not going to a hospital; I hate hospitals, Dadu died in a hospital. I hate the smell of Dettol and chlorine, it smells like death.  And I say this for myself, I believe Maggie is the food they serve in hell to punish demons. I will eat it if I don’t have a choice, “Khide pele baghe o ghash khaye”, (even the tiger eats grass when hungry); my mother loves talking in metaphors. I stood in the kitchen of my new shared flat in Delhi trying to remember how Dida, Mani and Ma cooked. What spices they used and how much water and how many whistles for the pressure cooker. I have all the equipments, actually I have more than what I would need. I spent the first month in Delhi in a PG, lived on Maggie and Burgers and freeloading off of my classmates who brought food from home. My new flatmates are far more encouraging and trusting me around the stove more than my family ever did or would. My mother jokes how if I cook they would get Tandoori Anisha for dinner.

Ma hated the idea of me leaving the house. Maybe that’s why she never let me inside the kitchen. She would say “I am paying for your education; you can learn to cook at your own time or pay somebody else to do it.” As if a maid and a cook come complimentary with a degree. Dida was more conniving about the girls in the house not knowing how to cook. She would fight with her daughters for being too soft on us. Mostly mad about me, my cousin’s room is cleaner and she knows her way around the kitchen. I am the only child. And I was stubborn, had a temper and I was given all the freedom in the world to act however I wanted to. Dadu and Bapi would not let people say a word to me. Ma and Bapi mostly felt guilty about leaving me alone. I grew up eating what Dida cooked. She cooked amazing Niramish food. I used to be picky and not eat if there was not an egg or a piece of fish on my plate, but with Dida’s Begun bhaja or aalu bhaja with daal and nobody even thought about fish. Niramish food is all well and good, but Sunday is no day for that. No compromise on the aamish dish on a Sunday. Dadu had made a rule of a family gathering on every other Sunday. Everybody would come in our house and everybody cooked what they cook best. Dida did the daal, Mani or Ma made the chicken, Ranga mani made the tomato chutney, Ranga dida made the bhaji. The Television was switched to Shaktimaan for the kids; that was the only way to keep us from running around the house. All that stopped once Dadu passed away. Ranga Mani got married and shifted to Shillong, had Megha a year after. This got Ranga Dida excited and busy with the baby. Mani got diagnosed with breast cancer. Dadabhai was having a hard time choosing what to study. The family was still helping each other out but it was scattered after Dadu passed away. He brought the family together under one roof once every week. The week before he had to be shifted to a hospital I had my high school finals the next week, he kept asking for chocolates. And everybody who visited him got him a bar of Dairy Milk. He always shared all his chocolates with me. Nobody was home and I only knew how to make pasta and noodles in a certain way. And he insisted on eating that for breakfast, so they packed it for him twice to the hospital before the doctor forbid him to eat that much oil.

I ate a lot of pasta during graduation. Our kitchen was separated then and Dida couldn’t stand me and my temper. So I cooked a lot of pasta. It became my primary meal. I had started dating then, and the boy thought that’s what we eat in the house in place of rice or roti. I could not decide what to cook now, and he asked if I got Pasta. I had made up my mind already. I am going to cook chicken that way Ma cooked. Or used to. Before I left this summer, I would beg her to cook that curry and she decided to experiment with all kinds of recipes. I don’t like eating boiled peas or peas in curry. Matar Paneer is a big NO. And one summer I went to stay with a couple of friends and they were all bachelors. So whatever they got I ate. And they got Matar, I didn’t complain, it was cheap, we are all young and on a budget and beggars can’t be choosers. When Ma asked what I am eating, I told her the truth. And she took it as a challenge upon herself that she would make me like Matar. So the summer before I left home, I ate 20 variations of matar and its uses in various dishes. The most atrocious of them all was the vegetarian omelet. What is a vegetarian omelet you ask? Well it is dried peas pasted and fried like a pancake with onions and salt in the batter. I don’t know what you make of that but it was not an omelet. There was not one egg in it, how do you call it an omelet when there is no egg in it. Mind you, my mother once said “veganism is the pinnacle of the contemporary bourgeoisie lifestyle” and the same woman made an omelet out of peas. I called her and got the recipe for chicken this afternoon. She promised she would cook it for me this time I am home. No more experiments with food, and definitely not any from the television. She has recently taken to watch a lot of television. Ma never completely retired from her job. But my grandmother has been sick for some time and she decided to stay with her. So she takes up projects rarely and gets a lot of free time which she spends watching Zee Bangla and all the cooking shows in that channel. I bet she got that awful omelet recipe from there.

I decided to cook chicken the way she cooks as a cure to my homesickness. I realized the only way I will get the food I like on my plate is if I cook it myself. So I did. I went to get the chicken myself. Washed it thoroughly under running water, placed the pieces in a large bowl, with a tablespoon of salt, turmeric, and other spices let it sit for nothing less than twenty minutes. In that time I make a paste of ginger, garlic, onion and green chilies set it aside, make a tomato puree and then set that aside. Then Heat the Korai and then add two table spoon of mustard oil and wait for it to heat up, I know it’s hot enough when it loses its raw smell. Then I add the ginger garlic paste to the oil; simmer down the gas so I don’t burn it. Add salt, holudh and cook for a while. Add the tomato puree, cook that for a while, then the chicken and then water and potatoes and wait till it all boils. It was good. My flatmates enjoyed it. It was not quite the way mom made it. I could not put my finger on what exactly did I miss. But it was not the same.

My friends like it, of course. They have no idea how Ma makes it, so this is new to them. I called to ask Ma, if I had missed a step. She laughed and told me not to compare everything I cook to what she did. “You will have a different way of manipulating food and treating spices, it would not be as mine or as Dida’s.” She told me she was proud that I am cooking my own food rather than complaining. The second attempt was a bit better. I got the salt right. I called my sister and told her about the success. She told me about how she too is trying to get the Gulab Jamun that Ma makes right. I will try making that too someday if I get the time. But for now, I will keep the recipes from our kitchen with me.

 I will write it down in a pocket diary and keep it close. When I travel in strange lands with strange people who make food different then mine, and I miss my family I will cook the food they gave me. That will be way of remembering loved ones who I will not see again, remembering the Sundays filled with the cacophony of laughter and getting scolded for stealing the extra Gulab Jamun, remembering places and people and how they made me feel and how their food gave me warmth and love, how they shared even when they barely had any for themselves. The Aalu, Begun, Maach bhaja from home cooked with love and care, the chicken and pork cooked in hostel under torches in kettles meant to boil water only, lighting incense sticks to cover the delicious smell from the warden, the pizza and alcohol in the bachelors pad bought with pooled money to the very last coin from the pockets of an unwashed trouser or celebrating a salary with Biriyani for breakfast and even my mother’s vegan omelet. Every morsel has a story, and a memory that makes us. I will write it all down and keep it in my Ranna Ghor.

Self Reflective Essay

I have never been comfortable writing down a poem or a prose piece. I do enjoy reading. But I have always had trouble framing words on the paper. Most times it does not make sense and if it does, it did not make the sense that I wanted it to make. I have never understood poetry. I do understand that it takes a lot for the craft and maybe that the reason I always shy away from anything that has remotely to do with poetry. I chose to write four pieces for the midterm assignment and I have only discussed it with my close friends. They received most of them well and it has encouraged me to write more. I got to read few new books which I found exciting and it did affect my perspective on most things. I do understand that I have to work on my words as well.

The workshop and the classes have really helped with finding my sense of words creatively. More than writing I enjoyed the classes. The interaction with the people and their point of view of writers as well the different analysis of the pieces that we studied and the works that were exhibited in class, helped with developing new perspectives to words. The interactive sessions were interesting as it also led to discovery of new pieces. The sessions with the graphic novels were really interesting. I take interest in reading comics, never read a graphic novel and deciphered so much of the image and the style of drawing a dialogue. After the class I went back to read couple of other books suggested in the course and I had a different reading of the material altogether. I can’t promise if I am going to start writing poetry after the sessions even though it was very encouraging. But I will definitely try to write more often. The class did make me aware of all the books I have not read. However I have made a list and from the class I take that I have to work on my words a little harder.